Vernor Vinge Quotes

By the 2030s, the nonbiological portion of our intelligence will predominate.

Within thirty years, we will have the technological means to create superhuman intelligence.

The capacity of computers is doubling every eight months. It's exponential development. I think it's a real threat, actually, that a computer one day will be more intelligent than us.

As Irving Good realised in 1965, machines with superhuman intelligence could repeatedly improve their design even further, triggering what Vernor Vinge called a 'singularity.'

But if the technological Singularity can happen, it will.

Artificial intelligence will reach human levels by around 2029. Follow that out further to, say, 2045, we will have multiplied the intelligence, the human biological machine intelligence of our civilization a billion-fold.

Some of the 'aha' insights that scientists strive for may have to await the emergence of post-human intellects.

Since the rise of Homo sapiens, human beings have been the smartest minds around. But very shortly - on a historical scale, that is - we can expect technology to break the upper bound on intelligence that has held for the last few tens of thousands of years.

It struck me deep in my mind. Some day, the chip is going to surpass mankind's brain.

Here I had tried a straightforward extrapolation of technology, and found myself precipitated over an abyss. It's a problem we face every time we consider the creation of intelligences greater than our own. When this happens, human history will have reached a kind of singularity - a place where extrapolation breaks down and new models must be applied - and the world will pass beyond our understanding.

Our computers double in capability on time scales of only a few years. It's hardly outrageous to believe that we will successfully develop thinking machines within a handful of decades, or at most a century or two. If that happens, these artificial sentients will quickly leave us behind.

I believe that at the end of the century the use of words and general educated opinion will have altered so much that one will be able to speak of machines thinking without expecting to be contradicted.

And we should keep our minds open, or at least ajar, to concepts on the fringe of science fiction. Flaky American futurologists aren't always wrong. They remind us that a superintelligent machine is the last instrument that humans may ever design - the machine will itself take over in making further steps.

Science fiction has done a really good job of scaring us into thinking that computers shouldn't get too smart, because as soon as they get really smart, they're going to take over the world and kill us, or something like that. But why would they do that?

The purest case of an intelligence explosion would be an Artificial Intelligence rewriting its own source code. The key idea is that if you can improve intelligence even a little, the process accelerates. It's a tipping point. Like trying to balance a pen on one end - as soon as it tilts even a little, it quickly falls the rest of the way.

I have argued above that we cannot prevent the Singularity, that its coming is an inevitable consequence of the humans' natural competitiveness and the possibilities inherent in technology.

Some claim that computers will, by 2050, achieve human capabilities. Of course, in some respects they already have.

Anything that could give rise to smarter-than-human intelligence - in the form of Artificial Intelligence, brain-computer interfaces, or neuroscience-based human intelligence enhancement - wins hands down beyond contest as doing the most to change the world. Nothing else is even in the same league.

For the moment, machines able to 'think' in anything approaching a human sense remain science-fiction. How we should prepare for their potential emergence, however, is a deeply unsettling question - not least because intelligent machines seem considerably more achievable than any consensus around their programming or consequences.

I absolutely don't think a sentient artificial intelligence is going to wage war against the human species.

I think that the development of artificial intelligence could lead to the end of the human race.

By definition, the Singularity means that machines would be smarter than us, and, in their wisdom, they can innovate new technologies. The innovations would come so quickly, and increasingly quickly, that the innovation would make Moore's Law seem as antiquated as Hammurabi's Code.

I think the 'Terminator' idea is a reasonable one - that is that one day the Internet becomes self-aware and simply says that humans are in the way. After all, if you meet an ant hill and you're making a 10-lane super highway, you just pave over the ants. It's not that you don't like the ants, it's not that you hate ants; they are just in the way.

I love stories like 'The Terminator' movies and 'The Matrix,' where our machines become self-aware and turn on us.

Once we no longer have the intellectual upper hand, then we quite literally, by definition, cannot outwit our successors. So unless we are absolutely sure that the machines we are building right now are not going to eventually become our new robot overlords, prudence is called for.